BEAUTY: Digital Art--David Kraftsow

Programmer and visual artist Dave Kraftsow created a Twitter bot that monitors YouTube videos within a specified parameter and creates amazing digital art out of YouTube's MP4 motion compensation algorithm. YouTube uses H.264 motion compression on MP4 videos, which fully captures only select frames (i-frames), filling in the rest with b-frames or p-frames that save the temporal differences between frames. While that conserves space, the image breaks up if any of the i-frames are missing. So Kraftsow's Twitter bot deliberately removes i-frames and then fills in the gaps with what it thinks should be there. Machine-made art. The results are really quite stunning: a beautiful, feathery smear of color until closer inspection reveals the jagged edges of pixels.

The bot automatically creates a new image every 3 hours. Check out the Twitter feed to follow the stream of these painterly glitches.
https://twitter.com/youtubeartifact/media

"Tiny Dancer" by Elton John

Yes, 46 years after its release, the classic Elton John song "Tiny Dancer" now has an official video!

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of their songwriting partnership, Elton John and Bernie Taupin gave new filmmakers the chance to create official music videos for three iconic Elton hits. A panel of industry renowned judges selected three winning filmmakers who went on to receive support from YouTube and top production studios to bring their ideas to life.

And here is Max Weiland's winning film for "Tiny Dancer," a very moving exploration of people, and their loneliness and interactions, all behind the wheels of their cars in and around Los Angeles. And as usual when Los Angeles is a feature (see films like the noir classic "The Big Sleep," the Coen Brothers' demented "Barton Fink," or David Lynch's modern masterpiece "Mulholland Drive") the city itself becomes a character as well. Indeed, this video recalls for me the brilliant, kaleidoscopic, stunning narrative of another L.A.-centric film, "Magnolia" by Paul Thomas Anderson.

http://www.eltonjohn.com/